I came to translate Enrica Garzilli‘s monumental biography of Giuseppe Tucci through Ann Goldstein, the renowned translator of Elena Ferrante’s work, who mentioned the project to me in January of 2014. Shortly after I was in touch with Enrica, and by March I found myself immersed in a text that covers over 1,360 characters—from poets to politicians, scholars, saints, and spies—and deals deeply with languages and cultures—Tibetan, Nepalese, and Indian above all—that I had little or no knowledge of. Suddenly I was confronted with precise Italian terms for Buddhist and Hindu concepts already foreign to me in English, typing out fifteen-letter words with diacritics I’d never seen. And translating is not simply a matter of converting one language into another, but of infusing the words with context. When the context is a foreign culture (or cultures) the work doubles (or triples!).

Living in New York City I have the good fortune of being surrounded by museums; since beginning the translation I have twice visited the Asia society, once for an exhibit featuring treasures from a Tibetan monastery, Golden Visions of Densatil, —including the photographs of Pietro Francesco Mele taken while on an expedition with none other than Giuseppe Tucci—and again to see an exhibit of Buddhist sculpture from Myanmar; I made two trips, as well, to the Rubin museum of Himalayan and Indian art in Chelsea. Almost more than to the artifacts my eye was drawn to the title cards, which are a glossary of cultural terms—stupa, thangka, bodhisattva, Vishnuite, Shivaite—and all thankfully used properly (the Buddha is capitalized, other buddhas are not, and so on), which served both as research and to stimulate my interest in the material.

Garzilli’s approach is nothing if not exhaustive—her hunt for Tucci’s story brought her to libraries and archives throughout Italy, in Tibet, Nepal, India, London, Washington, Boston and beyond—and to carry that thoroughness over into English has been a large part of my job as a translator. My experience before this project was principally as a poetry translator, where exactitude can often be a matter of creative interpretation and a deep sense of musicality, with room to improvise. In scholarly writing, as I quickly learned, exactitude is exactitude: letting the Latin-rooted verbs wield all their Latin precision; regarding the punctuation with a lawyer’s eye; rendering original quotations without flourish or fancy. The tedium nearly overwhelmed me. I longed for the spaciousness of poetry.

But then I had a draft of the introduction, which meant I soon had Enrica’s sharp corrections. Her intense queries, her suggestions, her second-guessing of a word choice, a comma, a dash, tightened and improved my sentences. They revived the text. Bearing her counsel in mind, I returned to the translation with a keener sense of the book’s tone and intent, and began to find joy in exactitude. Not only my knowledge of Italian, but as a result of translating Enrica’s work, of corresponding with her over the numerous drafts and revisions, my knowledge of English has grown immensely, the ways the language can be stretched and twisted and coaxed into expressing more, and more precisely.

Which is not to say that the book leaves no room for poetry or adventure. Tucci bounds across borders, vacuuming up languages and cultures, speaking boldly before his peers, making enemies and friends with equal vigor. We follow him to Santiniketan, during the early days of Tagore’s Visva-Bharati University. The fascinating world of academia under Fascist rule is revealed, the hoops to be jumped through, the money and promotions to be applied for, the men of power to whom one must appeal.

Learning of Tucci’s own guru, Carlo Formichi, of his pet mongooses and his absurd palanquin ride up a mountain, was a particular pleasure of translating the first volume. This biography is filled with life and lives, policies and places, it spans the globe, and that Ms. Garzilli has managed to hold it all up on her own is an Atlas-like achievement.

Who can forget the archaeologist and adventurer, Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones? Well, Giuseppe Tucci was not only a famed archaeologist and adventurer, but a famed scholar, a famed explorer, a famed collector of manuscripts and artworks, a famed spokesman for Mussolini in India, Nepal, and Japan (where his propaganda activity was fundamental to the diplomatic relations that led to the Anti-Comintern Pact, which Italy joined on November 6, 1937), a spy for the Fascist Regime, and for all his life a renowned lady-killer

Below is the full text of the article.
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A GREAT MAN FROM MACERATA WHO WENT FAR: GIUSEPPE TUCCI, THE MARCHES REGION AND THE EAST
by Enrica Garzilli

The scientist and explorer Giuseppe Tucci thus wrote about his journeys to Asia and his passion for travelling and experiencing “the far”: far from the banality and superficiality of everyday and massified relationships. And he really did go far, as he was the greatest expert in oriental studies that Italy has ever had and one of the best internationally recognised experts on Tibet, he was one of the first scientists in the world to explore the hitherto unexplored regions of Tibet and Nepal, he was an anthropologist, archaeologist, and he disseminated Asia culture, both ancient and contemporary – and he was a journalist too.

Tucci, the only legendary Italian oriental expert in the whole of Asia, gave the world a better understanding of the greatest Asiatic religions, and his critical editions and original translations of valuable texts in Sanskrit and in Tibetan opened up southern Asia to scholars. With his legendary scientific expeditions to Tibet, Nepal, Ladhak, Sikkim, and Bhutan he opened up these countries to geographers and modern travellers.

His work of discovery, restoration and preservation of rare manuscripts, which are today kept in Rome in the Tucci Foundation of the Oriental Library of IsIAO, the former IsMEO (Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East), safe from the inevitable dangers of the Asiatic climate, worms and rats – as specified in the descriptions of the microfilms that reproduce the manuscripts –, and from the even graver threat of destruction by man, due to both the Cultural Revolution when China annexed Tibet, and the greed of merchants and ignorant neglect, and his expeditions to the then almost inaccessible territories in the Himalayas, gave those countries a final place in history, and not only in the work of scholars. Moreover, following in the footsteps of his mentor Formichi, he updated the ways of studying oriental languages, with a first-hand understanding of the culture expressed by those languages, enriching the patrimony of knowledge of the world.

Tucci was born in Macerata on the 5TH of June 1894. His father Oscar and his mother Ermenegilda Firmani had emigrated to the Marches from Puglia. Something much stronger than birthright ties Tucci to the Marches. Perhaps it was the proximity of his native town and land to the sea, which has always brought different peoples, altough very distant, together as much as it has separated them; or perhaps, belonging to a region which has produced so many travellers and explorers of the East; whatever the reason, Tucci was immediately acclaimed as an ‘infant prodigy’ towards the East and, as he himself said, when he was only twelve he already knew Sanskrit, Hebrew and Iranian.